[HN Gopher] Show HN: Assetroulette - Randomized Assets for Webde...
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Show HN: Assetroulette - Randomized Assets for Webdesign
Author : ilovefood
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-06-03 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (assetroulette.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (assetroulette.com)
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Once I had a developer use a Meme image as an API response in
| development.
|
| It was funny, but it was surprisingly hard to explain to
| stakeholders during demos that this was not the real API
| response. I think I fielded questions from at least four
| annoyed/confused people asking why the image was there and
| insisting that it must be changed before we go live.
|
| I even got follow up emails asking for timelines on when it would
| be fixed.
|
| So sometimes it's better to just use a real placeholder or
| something realistic.
| ilovefood wrote:
| Hi HN,
|
| Since last year I developped many websites for friends that
| wanted either to start working on their own or just wanted to
| have a small online presence. While designing I always had
| problems finding the right pictures / images / stock or design
| inspiration to get them going so I whipped out a small free
| project to help me "randomly" find images
| https://assetroulette.com/.
|
| You can try it out, it's free, no need for registration, I am not
| gathering emails or whatever, it's so far just a simple tool I
| whipped up last weekend to solve a small niche problem I had.
|
| Currently hosted on a 3EUR/month server. It helped me visualize
| images in their context (web page) to iterate quickly. The issue
| I was facing was that while some images on stock websites looked
| cool at first, embedding them almost always looked bad and was a
| waste of time... This way I can refresh a couple of times and
| eventually find an image that is relevant (works for CSS too and
| generally any asset - even user provided ones - on the webpage
| that can be shuffled until it is satisfactory).
|
| I'll leave the website up for a little. I decided to share it
| because I successfully used it today on a website for a friend
| that wants to start selling jewelry. I would love to have some
| feedback, it's still in construction but maybe you can already
| find a good use of it. Thanks in advance!
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| I was like _Woah, okay, HN title filter must 've made a
| decapitalization mistake: Random Zoom for bums? No wait,
| there's an "et" there. French bums and gambling? Oh literal
| "assets," my bad. :D_
| beckingz wrote:
| The random_image api just returns a red image.
|
| The meme one works well though. This is a game changer for
| presentations and articles.
| ilovefood wrote:
| You are right, I just checked it still has the old version
| deployed for that endpoint. It creates a red image with random
| dimensions, I will fix it asap. Would you mind expanding on the
| last part?
| beckingz wrote:
| A common type of writing for newsletters, articles, and
| presentations is to use a meme image of some type every
| couple of paragraphs.
|
| This seems like a good method for doing that. Save time
| picking out 'the perfect meme' because a random meme will
| probably be just as good.
| ilovefood wrote:
| Understood, that makes total sense. I haven't seen it that
| way! Thanks for letting me know, I'll keep that in mind
| since I currently have 0 idea how to make this project
| viable or if it would be necessary to do so.
| beckingz wrote:
| You'd probably need to make it work with medium dot com,
| as that has weird embed requirements for images?
|
| You may also want to provide an option that generates a
| different meme/image if the api is called from the same
| page.
|
| Example: https://www.williamangel.net/context.html
|
| Would also fill this niche better if it could do tags
| like `random_meme?type=ironic` so that it could be used
| for this purpose, but at that point you'd probably be
| competing with giphy and a bunch of similar services.
| ilovefood wrote:
| Oh now I can answer.
|
| <img src="https://api.assetroulette.com/random_meme?hello
| =there"> <img src="https://api.assetroulette.com/random_m
| eme?general=kenobi">
|
| Should give two different images on the same page :) I
| think it's because of how the browser caches a request
| for the same url but I don't know exactly yet. :/ I will
| definitely implement the search part, that is a great
| idea! Thanks again.
| beckingz wrote:
| That helps! Though it is funny to have the same image in
| some cases.
|
| Fun tool.
| Jakobeha wrote:
| For random images there is also https://picsum.photos/.
|
| Also AI generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and
| https://imgflip.com/ai-meme.
|
| I don't know if the AI generators have an API, or if they like
| people using their images as random assets. So maybe you can
| focus on that?
| ilovefood wrote:
| Really nice, thanks for the heads up. While I was looking for
| something similar I somehow didn't find picsum.photos,
| interesting indeed! I stumbled upon placekitten and other
| services but great to see that the idea I had is actually
| something done by others too.
|
| You're right, I'll check into the AI generated images, I
| currently have a pretty beefy GPU machine at home that I was
| searching a use-case for :)
| swyx wrote:
| also:
|
| https://www.placecage.com/
|
| https://www.stevensegallery.com/
|
| https://www.fillmurray.com/
|
| more here https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-
| joy/blob/master/README.md#moc...
| bckr wrote:
| When I refresh, I still get the same crying kitty image. I think
| it's supposed to change?
| ilovefood wrote:
| I think it might have been a small server glitch. It's
| currently hosted on a 1vCPU 2GB Ram machine trying to keep up
| with front page traffic. Maybe try again? Is it the same kitten
| image on the demo page?
| NietzscheanNull wrote:
| I get the same meme image on refresh unless I open Chrome
| DevTools and right-click the refresh button, hitting 'Empty
| Cache and Hard Reload.' [Edit: looks like a regular hard
| reload also does the trick.]
|
| Seems to me like the image may need to be served with a
| cache-buster? If it helps, I'm running Chrome version
| 90.0.4430.212 (64-bit).
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(page generated 2021-06-03 23:01 UTC)